Sustainable Design in Practice

Training course on permaculture and natural building

Build, design, learn: youth workers from eight countries explored permaculture as a design system and built three natural buildings on the farm.

Why

The most powerful way to learn ecological design is to do it: on a real site, with real constraints, alongside people from different countries.

What happened

• Permaculture as design: ethics and principles, zoning, bioclimatic design and energy flows.
• Water and soil: swales, rainwater harvesting and composting toilets; soil, plants and plant guilds.
• Natural building: timber frames, natural insulation, lime and earth plaster, prepared in morning sessions and practised on site every afternoon.
• Simple and waste-free: only three sizes of timber and three types of screw, a cutting plan to use every plank in full, and insulation from local hay and around 100 old pillows from a local farm.
• A design for the farm: a permaculture layout for one of La Buona Terra’s spaces, presented and discussed together.

Results

• Three natural buildings built by the group on the farm. They work as dry toilets in summer and as storage for mattresses and tents in winter.
• Practical building skills, and methods youth workers can repeat with young people at home.
• Average overall satisfaction: 4.85 out of 5 (13 responses).

“I truly saw the importance of practical activities with a clear and material objective, in this case building three dry toilets, to increase team building, interaction and exchange.” (a Sustainable Design in Practice participant)

“My most valuable take-away: what permaculture is and how we can apply it to our lives even if we don’t live in the countryside or have a farm.” (a Sustainable Design in Practice participant)

See also the Carousel of Techniques (PDF), made by the participants of Make Your Voices Heard about this building site. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. © Associazione di Promozione Sociale Kora and project partners.